The scoop to which the present invention relates consists of a back wall, a bottom wall hinged to the back wall and a front wall hinged to the bottom wall. The side edges of the back and front wall have glue flaps hinged to them, these flaps being glued together to form an open-ended scoop.
The scoops have been manufactured on in-line machines as well as on more conventional scoop-forming machines. An in-line machine has multiple processing stations which process a web of paperboard in a sequence of operations. The machine includes a printing station; a cutting and scoring station; a stripper; and a forming station. One such forming station can be of the type disclosed in my copending application Ser. No. 740,638, filed June 3, 1985. As a web is fed through those stations, it is first printed. Then the web is cut and scored in such a way as to define the individual containers, the containers still remaining in web form. At the stripping station, the individual container blanks are stripped away from the web. The blanks are fed into the forming station where each container is formed around a mandrel with glue applied to the side flaps. The thus formed container is stripped off the mandrel and pushed into a stack in nesting relationship to previously-formed containers. While in that stack, the container is held in its formed condition while the glue on the side flaps sets.
The in-line machines process multiple containers simultaneously from a single web. For example, the machines might process five containers transversely across the web. Forming containers in that fashion would be referred to as "five up."
Two commercially known scoops are shown in FIGS. 1,2 and 3,4, respectively, of the drawings. As shown in FIG. 1, the scoop includes a back wall 10, a front wall 11, and a bottom wall 12. Side flaps 13 are hinged to the back wall and side flaps 14 are hinged to the front wall. The flaps 14 have lower edges 15 which abut the back wall 10, thereby tending to fix the distance between the front and back walls and hence the volume of the containers. That container is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,502,623.
To form the container, the flat blanks therefor are laid out on a web as shown in FIG. 2. The web, of course, is initially a plain, unprinted, uncut, unscored paperboard web. The illustration of FIG. 2 is to show how the individual scoops will be cut from the web, the hatched areas representing scrap to be discarded. As can be seen, the individual scoops are aligned side-by-side or transversely as well as being aligned longitudinally. For the purposes of illustrating the invention, it will be assumed that the distance between center lines of adjacent containers is 1.0X inches.
The second form of prior art to be discussed is illustrated in FIGS. 3 and 4. There, the back wall, front wall and bottom wall are the same as in the previous patented embodiment. In the embodiment of FIGS. 3 and 4, however, the side walls 23 and 24 are narrower than in the previous embodiment. It can be seen that the edges of the side flaps 24 do not abut the back wall 10.
This construction has an advantage as well as a disadvantage. The advantage is that the containers can be manufactured in a nesting relationship as shown in FIG. 4, the hatched areas again representing scrap. It will be observed that the containers in one longitudinal file are in staggered relation with the scoops in the adjoining longitudinal file, thus permitting the containers to nest on the web. The distance between centers is reduced to 0.87X inches, thereby presenting a 13% saving in board over the patented embodiment. There is a sacrifice, however. Because the side flaps are narrow enough to permit the nesting relationship, they do not provide the stability required to produce uniform volume containers at all times. Even the patented container admits of a certain amount of skewing of back wall with respect to front wall, but it is not as pronounced as in the container of FIGS. 3 and 4.